


Why, You Ask

by ponderinfrustration



Series: Luckless Romance [7]
Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux, Phantom - Susan Kay
Genre: F/M, Interstitial, Kay!verse, Pharoga overtones, Reference to Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2016-02-10
Packaged: 2018-05-08 07:13:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5488391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponderinfrustration/pseuds/ponderinfrustration
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the month between Erik's death and her marriage to Raoul, Christine visits Nadir, desperate to know so many things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Request

“I want you to tell me about Erik.”

Christine Daaé’s face remains palely impassive, her eyes blank. It’s as if she’s schooled herself into not betraying her sentiments, and it is more than a little unsettling to see her hiding her feelings like this, when not so long ago those feelings were written as plain as day in every line of her being.

Nadir sighs and fingers the chain of his new watch. (A faint pang in his heart at the memory of the old one, threaded through Erik’s still fingers. He stole it so often it may as well have been his own. It is only right that he have it now, forever entwined with his fingers alongside the plain necklace that she must have left with him. How oddly appropriate, that something from each of them should lie with him forever.) The woman across from him is a far cry from the Mademoiselle Daaé who rushed into that subterranean house with a frantic gleam in her eye not even a month ago. Her hands sit still in her lap, wrapped around the cup that Darius brought her – hot tea, with lemon. He knew who his caller was of course, the moment that Darius said that there was a young woman here to see him. In truth, there is no other young woman who would care to pay him a visit. The hours shut away in that room with Erik have changed her immeasurably, and it flickers briefly in his mind to wonder what the Vicomte must think of this transformation.

“What do you want to know about Erik?”

 _I fancy you knew him much better than me, at the last._ The words are on the tip of his tongue and he bites them back. A glance of pain fleets across her impassive eyes, as if she’s heard his unspoken thought, and she swallows, lips twisting.

Her dress is of the darkest blue, black down the bodice and intricate embroidery. While the blue accentuates the natural colour of her eyes, it highlights the very whiteness of her skin, the faint creases which her concealer doesn't quite hide, the marks of the trauma of what she’s been through. His heart twists for her and the black ribbon in her hair. _Mourning colours_ , a voice whispers, deep in his mind. Of course she's wearing mourning colours.

“You were his friend. You knew him longer than anyone. I want to know everything.”

 _Everything._ Such a simple word, and yet it betrays so much.

There is so much that he could tell her, but so much of it she would find abhorrent and whatever Erik may have been in his life Nadir can't find it in himself to reveal such things to this young woman. The torture chamber, the khanum’s whims, the little slavegirl, the display with the coffin, the end of Suleiman Khan, leader of the Babi dissidents. She’s been through quite enough without any of that.

He sips at his glass of wine and sighs, composing himself before speaking so as to avoid disturbing her unduly. “I fear much of what I could tell you would be unsuitable to your ears.”

Her eyes flash fire, and she sits straighter in her chair, chin high. “He told me about the murders, if that's what you’re getting at. I know all about _those_. Everything else…”

Nadir must confess to being taken aback by her words. He didn't expect Erik would have burdened her with such knowledge, but then he shouldn't be surprised. Erik always was unpredictable. He’d have had some reason.

“I want to know what he was like.” Her voice falters for a moment, lips trembling, and she looks down at the cup she’s still holding. “Surely you can understand why I need to know.” The quiet plea in those words makes his eyes burn. “There are so many questions that I want answers to. How did you meet him? Did he keep a cat? Did he invent things in Persia? Did he play his music to the shah’s court? What were his magic tricks like? Why did they poison him? What happened to drive him away? Did he take his tea with lemon even then? There are so many little things and big things about him that I…I just want to _know_. I know so little and now he’s…” She stops, swallowing, and raises her gaze to meet his again, tears glittering in her eyes. “I _need_ to know, Monsieur.”

A friend. She said the same thing about him when she sat at Erik’s bedside and asked him to stand as their witness before God, the tears trickling from Erik’s eyes as if he couldn't believe the vision holding his hand. _You’ve been a friend to him_. It didn't seem that way but yes, he was Erik’s friend and Erik was his friend and Allah but he misses him so much, a hollowness in his chest where something undefinable has been ripped away. It hits him afresh every morning when he wakes, the pressing, aching knowledge that Erik is _dead_ and there’s nothing that he can do about it except miss him.

And she misses him too. It is plain to see now that her mask of untouchable calmness has fallen away. She misses him perhaps even more than Nadir does and she’s taking her tea the way he did and asking about him in order to get closer to him, and if Nadir could give her Erik back, even for an hour, he rather thinks he would.

Yes, she deserves to know. She deserves to know everything that he can tell her.

“Nadir. Please, call me Nadir.”

If he was a friend to Erik, there’s no reason why he can't be a friend to her too. Erik would want her to have a friend outside of the Vicomte. And where must young de Chagny think his fiancée is now? It doesn't seem right to ask, to remind her that as much as she loves and misses Erik there’s another man whom she also loves and who loves her.

She nods, and smiles sadly. “Thank you, Nadir.”

It won't be easy to tell her about how gentle Erik was with Reza. It won't be easy to tell her _any_ of it, even if he censors out the less-than-savoury bits, and downplays Erik’s fits of depression, the demons in his mind that drove him to hashish and opium and then morphine. Though he suspects she knows about those demons already. But yet he must tell her. It is, in a way, a duty to impart those stories of Erik to her, to give her something of his to hold onto other than her own memories of the man. She deserves to know about him.

He tops up his wine glass and sits deeper into his chair, the new watch chain still strange between his fingers.

“We met in his tent at the Grand Fair in Nijny-Novgorod…”


	2. Comfort

She’s paler when he finishes his story, their tea cold and her fingers fidgeting at the handkerchief she holds, twisting it until it is at risk of disintegrating, threads loosening, falling apart. Perhaps it was a mistake to tell her so much of it, perhaps he should have censored it more (perhaps he should have kept it all to himself), but she had a right to know and still does. Of course she should know.

(Most of it, the bits that he was not there for, he learned in those long weeks of Erik’s illness, in the moments when he was too weak to rage and too melancholy to be left alone, before he miscalculated his morphine. Some of it he knew already, the tales of adventure more than the tales of the man, told to him on the long journey to Ashraf, when they were half-enemies, half-acquaintances, and it was merely a job.)

Madeleine. Javert. Giovanni. Names with so much to say, so many stories encapsulating a young man’s life. And then his years as a travelling magician. His time in Persia and these are the details that Nadir knows best, where he started his story before going back. (He is oddly proud, telling of his poor, dear Reza, voice steady and heart twisting.) India, Turkey, Belgium. He’s learned it all or he’s picked up enough to fill in the story. (And a laugh bubbles up inside of him at the thought of Erik as a contractor, doing something so _ordinary_ but it dies before it reaches his throat when he remembers the morphine that it let him buy. That dreadful drug that’s cost them all so much.) Paris, and Garnier, and the days of the Commune, and the completion of the Opera House. Her lips twist at the mention of finding Ayesha, and he leaves out all that Erik said about Christine herself, his soft murmurings of the first time he heard her sing, and how he loved teaching her and fought to keep his distance but couldn’t, the slow tears that he was oblivious to trickling down his cheeks as he spoke of her. And his eyes shone with all that was unsaid about _dear Christine_ , his voice cracking and lips twisting.

She is crying silently, too, when he finishes and as Darius bustles in with fresh tea she raises the much-abused handkerchief to dab away the tears.

“Thank you,” she murmurs, words so desperately faint. “Thank you for everything.” Nadir closes the gap between them with his hand, laying it gently on her arm.

“He loved you very much,” he whispers, wanting to assure her of that so badly because no matter what else Erik may have done there can be doubt that he _did_ love her. “The things that he did were wrong - taking you, dropping the chandelier, the torture chamber and so much else besides. I will not try to justify them, because they do not bear justification. But he did love you and he was glad to have borne the pain of his past just to get to know you at the end. He told me as much when he truly believed he would never see you again. And he was sorry, so very sorry, for all that he’d done to hurt you.”

She doesn’t speak, but there’s a world of gratitude in her tear-filled eyes and it eases the hollowness inside of him to think that he might have brought her some comfort. Allah knows she needs it after all that she’s suffered. For the first time he feels oddly thankful that he did not have to sit with Erik as he slipped away, and that thankfulness sits guiltily in his chest. He should have been there. She should not have been alone with him, not then, should not have had to bear that alone.

They sit like that for a long time, each drawing strength from the other, quiet in their own thoughts. If he could take away her grief he would. He would grant her relief, and peace, let her put this time behind her even if Erik’s spectre would always linger in her heart. But he is powerless to do so, however merciful it may be, and he can see it in her eyes that she will carry this grief inside of her always, until her own death comes.

He knows the look. He has seen it in his own reflection and even now he longs for Rookheeya to take him in her arms and promise him that everything is all right, that Reza is all right.

(He saw it in Erik, too, the night he sent her away. It was etched into his face, the hollowness, the numbness. He scalded his fingers making tea, such was the trembling in his hands. Then he sat in his chair and stared at nothing for hours, not daring to speak, each breath unsteady, until the tears spilled from his eyes. It was the first time Nadir ever held him, Erik’s maskless face pressed into his chest as he made soothing noises until he cried himself out.)

“I have some things of his,” he says, eventually, to break the spell of the memory as he sits back in his chair and moves his hand from her arm. “Mostly scraps of manuscripts and such. I wish I could have saved some complete ones, but he was very thorough and, well, they are yours if you would like to have them.” Mementoes of the man that Erik was, and he thinks that she might like to keep them but she catches him by surprise when she shakes her head.

“No, thank you, Nadir. They are yours and I couldn’t take them.” She hesitates a moment and swallows, then nods resolutely. “I went back there a few nights ago,” she murmurs, lips barely moving, as if she is afraid the Vicomte could overhear her here, “and I took his cloak, and a couple of the dresses that he had made for me. I…I think he would have liked for me to keep them. When he went to so much trouble.”

Nadir’s throat tightens and he nods. Erik would want that, would have been so proud of the work that went into those dresses, his muse ever in his mind.

_…enthusiasm to satisfy an artist’s insatiable vanity_.

The remembered words echo in his mind, only it is not Reza’s voice now but Erik’s own. An artist, yes he was. Vain, undoubtedly. And before Nadir sits his _greatest masterpiece_ , as he called her when half out of his own head, yet still so very proud and vain. What would he think to see her now, composed once more and every word heavy with her love for him, and her grief? How would he feel to know his death was the cause of so much pain? Would it make him fight harder? Could he have given up the morphine, then, and bought more time with her?

(Would he have sent her away with the Vicomte at all?)

So many questions, and no way to answer them for the man who is the cause of it all is lying in a grave of his own planning, and there’s nothing that Nadir can do about that.

(Nadir sat by the body for a long time, mind too blank to think or even feel, simply existing in that room of guttering candles. Erik’s hands where they lay on his chest cold beneath his hand. He hadn’t wanted to be alone, on the night he sent Christine away. He didn't say it, would never bring himself to admit it, but he was so very afraid of what he might do if he were alone. He hadn't wanted to be alone then so how could Nadir leave him lying alone while he waited for Darius to arrive to attend to the necessary details of burial? He was the one who wrapped him in a shroud, carefully, gently, Darius waiting for all to be ready, and did not give him back his mask, not even in death. That mask that was for so long armour and cage rests now alongside the scraps of manuscript, and he takes it out sometimes when the pain twists so hard inside that he can’t breathe, and the time he spent with Erik feels as if it were a fever dream. How can he be sure he is not still lying delirious in his tent on the journey back from Nijny-Novgorod? The mask grounds him, though he longs to tear it apart for all that it did and meant.)

“I needed something to remember him by, more than a ring that I can’t wear in front of my fiancé.” Her voice is a whisper that breaks his thoughts, and he is shocked to feel the tears stinging his eyes.  She smiles at him, a sad twitch of her lips, and squeezes his hand in hers. “Sometimes it feels it never happened, and all of the time I spent with him was only a dream.”

Her thoughts mirror his own so closely. But it was not a dream, was so very far from a dream. The pain attests to that, and what he is feeling can only be a shadow of what she’s going through. She loved him, she lay with him as he died, she is in every way a widow, just as he has been a widower ever since Rookheeya and if what she is feeling is even only a quarter of what he felt in those long weeks and months after Rookheeya’s death …

(It is more than that, he knows. It is so much more than that.)

How he would protect her if it were within his power to do so. Erik would want him to look out for her – and for the Vicomte, for her sake – there is no doubt of that. But they have each other, and they do not need his protection. What is there for him to protect them from now?

He musters a smile for her, and pats her hand. It’s on the tip of his tongue to ask her to write to him, to tell him how she is getting on in England and her new life. But perhaps that would only serve as one more painful reminder of what she has lost, and so he locks the words away deep inside himself.

She leaves shortly after, with a soft ‘Thank you’ and a hug that surprises him, yet is so welcome and seems to force the bleeding edges inside of himself together, still not enough to cauterise the wound. He doubts if it can ever be cauterised. Likely it will bleed secretly, hidden, as long as he lives and there is simply nothing that he can do about that, no treatment and no doctor that can cure him. And there is an odd communion between the two of them, as he squeezes her hand one last time before sending her on her way, both recognising that here is someone who understands. They do not have to be alone.

(Though he did not ask, three weeks later a letter arrives from England and the first words of it make his eyes burn with their lonely poignancy.

_I have no one else to talk to about him, you see_ …)


End file.
